Remember Star Wars? Do you remember the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative to build a massive missile defense system that raised so much controversy during the Reagan and first Bush years?

130 billion of our tax dollars were poured into developing that system. It was designed to detect and intercept missiles fired from an unknown destination traveling at well over 10 times the speed of a commercial airliner, and to shoot them down in 15 minutes or less, before they reached their US targets.

According the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) website, "a defensive system may need to hit a warhead smaller than an oil drum that is traveling above the atmosphere at speeds greater than 13,000 miles per hour." The CBO report states that missile defense and intercept systems must take down an ICBM in a matter of minutes or it is all over.

You may remember that before 9/11, there were a number of tests of the Pentagon's missile defense systems. Some tests failed, while others succeeded. But there is an important question here. If these sophisticated military systems were designed to detect missiles fired from unknown locations at over 13,000 mph and shoot them down in mere minutes, why on 9/11 could they not detect any one of the four large airliners traveling at a mere 600 mph, especially when two of them were known to be lost for over 40 minutes before they crashed?

This question applies especially to Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. The first plane hijacking on 9/11 was reported at about 8:20 AM (see NY Times article), well over an hour before Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:38. According to the Times article, Flight 77 was reported lost at 8:56 A.M., 42 minutes before it crashed. Even if the FAA radar systems completely failed and FAA officials failed to alert the military, all military leaders certainly knew within minutes that the World Trade Center had been hit at 8:46. By 9:03, when the second tower was hit, they certainly knew there were big problems.